


Once More, as Aliens

by Emma Kowal (holocenery)



Category: The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-30 07:03:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3927379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holocenery/pseuds/Emma%20Kowal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love... For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right." – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, page 267.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once More, as Aliens

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a re-imagining of a portion of The Left Hand of Darkness, and as such, takes place within the end of the 16th chapter and the body of the 18th. I recommend reading when the original is fresh in the mind, or better, with a copy of the book on hand to fill in the gaps - italicized blocks of text are Le Guin's, as are, of course, all places, characters and concepts. I aim only to humbly imagine how these chapters might have gone were Genly a little less wise or Estraven a little less lucky.

16

* * *

 

BETWEEN DRUMNER AND DREMENGOLE

 

...

_Guyrny Thanern. Some snow, rising wind and falling temperature. Thirteen miles again today, which brings our distance logged since we left our first camp to 254 miles. We have averaged about ten and a half miles a day; eleven and a half omitting the two days spent waiting out the blizzard. 75 to 100 of those miles of hauling gave us no onward gain. We are not much nearer Karhide than we were when we set out. But we stand a better chance, I think, of getting there._

Still, nothing is as simple as I would like. Though our spirits are lighter since we came up out of the volcano-murk, things are complicated by my being in kemmer. My plan had been to pass through secher without touching my companion and thereby ride out the first phase alone without achieving potency. This proved infeasible, or perhaps I was simply careless. I must have touched him at some point during the day’s run (or perhaps airborne transmission is sufficient for the hormones of his race?) for by the time we had the tent pitched and the stove on I was in full thorharmen, and rapidly taking on the characteristics of a female.

I do not know if Ai noticed the physical changes, already nearly complete before we began dinner. He certainly noticed the change in my demeanour. I was doubly hard-pressed to disguise this, as I rarely took the female role in my kemmering with Ashe, and to do so inevitably made me think of my brother. All through our discussion I was tormented by memories of him in addition to an extreme physical awareness of my companion. This time I had neither drugs nor detestation to numb desire, nor the energy to divert it into untrance or any other channel of the discipline, nor a refuge with which to quit Ai’s presence. I found myself weighing the cost of days we might lose against the toll it would take on me to endure full kemmer alone, though I fear the calculation was badly done, in the haze of my arousal and exhaustion.

Inevitably Ai asked, had he offended me? I looked at him in the soft glow of the Chabe stove, this dark, husky, alien youth, and burned in the heat and damp of the tent. I looked away as I explained my unease. My resolve would not hold out if he were to press the matter.

To my dismay, he did not shrink away, but moved carefully closer.

His insolence enraged me but the rage drowned without complaint in the tide of desire. I rebuked him as harshly as I could and fumbled for the off switch on the stove, thinking to sequester myself in the furthest corner of the tent for the night, but his large dark hand closed over mine, lifted it and laid our palms together like the two hands of one man, and I felt the wheel spinning out of my control.

We coupled as best we were able in the confines of the tent and the shackles of our hunger and exhaustion. Considering these challenges, meeting Ai in kemmer was unexpectedly sweet. In loving he is as serious and gentle as ever, and more patient than I have seen him before, perhaps more experienced than I expected. In this, more quickly in any of our other interactions, our instincts seemed to align. I do not know what this means about the phylogenetic distance between our races, or about human sexuality, or about the two of us. Perhaps it says the most about me, that I adapt so effortlessly to unorthodox roles: if a brother, why not an alien?

Lying in the dark after we had exhausted ourselves for the night, I am for a moment overwhelmed by the absurdity and solemnity of our situation. Two aliens, swallowed in the vastness of the Ice, we are singular, isolate, cut off from our societies, and yet engaged in this journey for the sliver of hope of uniting them - perhaps it is fitting that we should unite physically in the process.

I think of Ai, his dark smooth skin, large eyes, large hands, and wonder that he should have come down out of the stars to Karhide, to the Ice, to me – the awful risk and responsibility of it, the awful distance in time and space, for one man. And yet for all that I know nothing of his world, and he barely knows of mine, in the language of kemmering we know well enough how to speak to each other.

How ineffably different we were, and yet how similar! _Tormer's Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,_

 _Light is the left hand of darkness_  
_and darkness the right hand of light._  
_Two are one, life and death,_  
_lying together like lovers in kemmer,_  
_like hands joined together,_  
_like the end and the way._

 _My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words._ Ai, asleep, said nothing.

Yrny Thanern. We were late leaving the tent this morning. It has been some time since I have had a partner for my kemmer, and for several hours I forget the hunger and the fear and the long hard days ahead of us. It is as if breakfast had been a mug of Sithish lifewater instead of orsh – the tent is warm and stupid and full of sticky-sweet laughter. That morning we are the hot young heart of the world.

Despite the delay, we made good progress – nearly _eighteen miles today, east-northeast by compass, on skis. We got clear of the pressure-ridges and crevasses in the first hour of pulling. Both got in harness, I ahead at first with the probe, but no more need for testing: the firn is a couple of feet thick over solid ice, and on the firn lie several inches of sound new snow from the last fall, with a good surface. Neither we nor the sledge broke through at all, and the sledge pulled so light that it was hard to believe we are still hauling about a hundred pounds apiece._

Ai did much of the hauling himself in the afternoon, with ease on this splendid surface. I tried to insist that we take turns but he was adamant about bearing the brunt of the load. He cited his superior strength and likened this arrangement to the unequal rationing of our food, which was certainly logical, but nonetheless I felt uneasy. His words struck a note I had never heard in our interactions, one I could not place. Perhaps these are the petulant worries of a kemmer-addled brain, but I fear that something is changed between us.

Nusuth. There is nothing to be done. The wheel turns. The miles of ice stretch on.

 

18

* * *

  
ON THE ICE

 

_..._

_Mindspeech was the only thing I had to give Estraven, out of all my civilization, my alien reality in which he was so profoundly interested. I could talk and describe endlessly; but that was all I had to give. Indeed it may be the only important thing we have to give to Winter. But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing._

The Ekumen have no laws regarding sexual intercourse between the First Mobile and the citizens of the planet to which he is sent. Indeed, the diversity of sexual norms and practices across cultures is such that some Mobiles find such relations are necessary to develop any sort of rapport; it would be counterproductive to try to regulate these by the standards of one society or another.

In my years on Winter I never developed anything close to a friendship, let alone romantic relationship, with any Gethenian – save Estraven, and with him for years a friendship with neither trust nor understanding. Accordingly, I assumed very early on that my mission would likely be a celibate one. This was the least of the personal sacrifices required of me as a Mobile, and was not altogether a sacrifice, as I had conflicting feelings about the idea of coupling with a temporary woman, a woman who was a man.

It came as a surprise to me, then, that when Estraven entered kemmer for the first time in our long trek over the Ice, I did not feel conflicted at all about my course of action.

_It was a night early in the journey, our second night up on the Ice. We had spent all day struggling and back-tracking in the cut-up, crevassed area east of the Fire-Hills. We were tired that evening but elated, sure that a clear course would soon open out ahead. But after dinner Estraven grew taciturn, and cut my talk off short. I said at last after a direct rebuff, "Harth, I've said something wrong again, please tell me what it is." He was silent._

_"I've made some mistake in shifgrethor. I'm sorry; I can't learn. I've never even really understood the meaning of the word."_

_"Shifgrethor? It comes from an old word for shadow." We were both silent for a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak._

In that moment he looked not unlike a woman I had known on Earth, and I felt a rush of affection and desire for this being, both the most inscrutable and the most familiar to me in all this world. I thought when he looked away that I had been imagining the answering affection in his eyes, but then he explained: he was in kemmer. Of course. I had not imagined the look of longing, nor the subtle changes in the lines of his face, the enticing new curve and swell of skin under shirt and breeches. It became suddenly intolerable, impossible to think of my companion as a man.

My head spun, but the way seemed clear. I knew well how taxing it was on a Gethenian to go through the full kemmer cycle alone, and Estraven did not even have the solace of solitude for his time. The path of least resistance was to simply let nature take its course. I knew I was not alone in thinking this – my companion’s words warned me to stay back but tone and posture, more and more clearly feminine by the moment, bid me to come closer. I felt the familiar old stirring and heat, the quickening of pulse.

“It would sap your strength to endure this alone, no?” I crawled toward Estraven, slow and deliberate, as one might toward a wild animal.

Catching my intention, those dark otter-like eyes flashed warning. “Do not –”

“Harth, I can help.”

“Ai –”

“Why abstain? What could it hurt?” I caught the hand that reached to turn off the light and thus terminate our conversation, this woman who now shared my tent. At the touch her breath caught and she seemed to melt, though only partially – there was still a gleam of apprehension in the wide eyes.

“This is easier, no?” Thinking of an East Karhidish tale she had once recounted to me, I lifted our hands and laid the palms together, aligned our fingers for comparison. They were not the same, as in the tale. My hand was larger and darker, stronger despite being scarred already by frostbite. It dwarfed hers. She did not pull away.

“Therem,” I murmured, trying the name for the first time. Her breath came quickly and the tent pulsed with heat. For only the second time on Winter I felt like I was wearing too many clothes.

“Tell me what to do,” I said.

That night, we stayed up long past the customary hour after our evening meal, and the next morning awoke late, and again lingered in the tent long after breakfast. The sun was well in the sky when we emerged, heady and buzzing with joy, onto the snow. The urgency and danger of our present situation seemed remote now, all our fire diverted to other ends. As difficult as it was for me to leave that warm tent, I knew it must be harder for Estraven, whose sexual drive was all-consuming at this stage, and so I bit my tongue against any complaints.

All day I could not help but stare at my companion. She glowed, radiant. In a rare moment of sun on that gray-blue day she pulled back her hood and I stared openly at the lustrous thick hair, the flushed cheeks. How could I ever have thought of this creature as a man? The power and shrewd intelligence that had struck me as so masculine before were forgotten in the face of her present beauty. Every time our eyes met it was an electric shock of lust. I was enraptured.

We made good progress that day despite the late start, and had barely set up the tent before we were entangled again, still shivering from the bone-deep cold as we shed our clothes without waiting for the stove to warm our shelter. The build-up of tension throughout the day’s pull was near intolerable: had it not been well below freezing all day, no doubt we would have been rolling in the snow. It is a wonder we got the tent set up at all.

Later, after dinner and another round of kemmering, I decided the time was ripe to try teaching Estraven to mindspeak. We lay together, me with my back to the stove to absorb more warmth, she writing in her journal by its light, and I felt such a peace and harmony with the world as to reach up and seize the breath from my throat. I was, even then, dimly aware of the possibility of being carried away with the novelty of taking our relationship to this level, but it struck me as a remote concern, nothing to disturb my present well-being.

Warm and sleepy, I gently probed the limits of our empathic connection, the channel through which her mind and mine participated in a dynamic exchange of emotional states. Our kemmering had strengthened this habit, and I expected mindspeech would be a simple thing to add to it. I stood, mentally, at the door of this connection, and bespoke her – _“Therem!”_

The tent exploded into chaos. Estraven bolted upright with a cry of shock and spun wildly about, gasping “Arek? Arek?”

“It is me, Genly Ai – just me – Therem –” I held up both palms in an attempt to calm her, speaking low and gentle, though my heart too was racing.

“I heard my brother’s voice, just now. My dead brother.”

Shaking, she stared past me, past the wall of the tent, out at some distant point.

“I am sorry. I should have warned you first. You said last spring that you would like to learn about the paraverbal speech of my people – I bespoke you just now.”

She was silent for some time, fixing me with that inscrutable feline gaze. The emotional mind-connection between us had dissolved in a wave of shock and terror and I could not guess at her thoughts. Finally, she said “Prove it. Do it again.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

I swallowed thickly and reached out with my mind again, as gently as I knew how. _"Therem, my darling, there's nothing to fear between us."_

She stared and stared, and I felt a cold prickle of unease, whether my own or trickling through the remnants of our empathic bond I could not say. Just as I was about to ask if she had heard and understood this message, she turned off the light of the Chabe stove and, slipping soundlessly into her sleeping bag, turned away from me. Though I knew the lust of full kemmer must be still burning in her, it was clear that there would be no love between us that night.

I cursed myself for being so foolish, and resolved to in the morning apologize for my haste. How presumptuous of me, and thoughtless, to imagine that the inner conversation which was so natural and comfortable to me would be the same for my companion. I feared that my careless action had opened a chasm between us, and in my very effort to breach the final barriers to our communication, I had set us back to a worse understanding of one another than ever before. Certainly I could not fathom the thoughts that now occupied Estraven, thoughts no doubt of her deceased brother Arek, of whom she had spoken only rarely. _I did not know what, besides love and death, lay between them._

I slept fitfully and woke for the first time to find Estraven already up, her face decorated with shadows.

“Good morning,” I said.

She looked at me and abruptly I realized it was not simply hunger and lack of rest that changed the shape of her face, but that the kemmer period, too, was coming to an end. The soft familiar glow of womanhood had all but left my companion, and she was once more unsettlingly ambiguous in features, as alien to me as ever. The tent seemed larger and colder than usual. Her reply seemed to echo from the its walls, as in a canyon. I cleared my throat.

“About last night – I wanted to say, I am sorry – ”

“Nusuth,” she said, slipping out of the tent without further explanation.

We passed the next week or more with this distance between us, the euphoria of our brief kemmering forgotten, as a dream. I slept fitfully, the hunger and cold and now regret and loneliness gnawing at my bones – though Estraven and I slept in close quarters and pulled together each day, shared the duties of preparing meals and shelter, our talk was trivial and shallow: we had never been more isolated from one another.

 _Day after day,_ in this fashion, _we crept on eastward over the plain of ice. The midpoint in time of our journey as planned, the thirty-fifth day, Odorny Anner, found us far short of our halfway point in space. By the sledge-meter we had indeed traveled about four hundred miles, but probably only three-quarters of that was real forward gain, and we could estimate only very roughly how far still remained to go. We had spent days, miles, rations in our long struggle to get up onto the Ice._

“We will endure,” said Estraven simply when I voiced my trepidation about the hundreds of miles that still lay ahead of us. “We have been eating very well thus far. I imagine we will have to cut rations soon.”

“Surely you’re joking?” I asked, and was fixed with a frank and humorless stare.

“Not at all.”

Not long later, when a blizzard kept us from leaving the tent for three straight days, Estraven made good on this promise. On the first night she soaked a half-pound of gichy-michy in the stove pan, taking surgical care with every step, and set the small blessed bun before me.

“Where is your portion?” I asked, hesitating though I longed to tear into my meal.

“As long as we are not pulling, sugar-water will sustain me.”

“Impossible –”

“No. I will be fine. You, on the other hand, should eat, though only half-rations while we are trapped here. You have no experience in starvation”

My cheeks burned with humiliation. “And you do? I do not believe it – you must also eat, Therem, or else a fine way for our journey to end, me feasting from my sleeping bag while you waste away –”

“Do not speak of things you do not understand,” interrupted Estraven, and when I looked she had risen up on her knees, fists clenched in a quiet fury that I had not seen before. “Privation is an art of my people. I was taught to starve before I could walk. In Rotherer Fastness among the Handdarata I starved, and was tested in my abilities to do so, as it was a core component of my training. The long months I toiled in the sewers of Mishnory, an exile for your sake, I starved. I have been starving longer than you have been alive, discounting your absurd time-jumps, so do not doubt for one second that I know what I am doing. You know nothing.”

I gaped. Estraven sat back on her heels, breathing harshly through her nostrils, apparently just as shocked as I was by this uncharacteristic outburst.

“Therem –”

“Eat.”

Cowed, I tore into my meagre rations. Estraven brooded and sipped her sugar-water. For the second time on our journey, I planned my apology fastidiously in my mind while waiting for the opportunity to deliver it. The moment I finished eating, I tried again, and was again interrupted.

“Listen, Therem –”

 _“Tell me,_ Genry Ai, _how does the other sex of your race differ from yours?”_

I was startled anew at this question, so wholly different from what I had been expecting. Seeing the seriousness with which it was asked, I scoured my brain for a reply.

“Well, they tend to be smaller than males... In the specific characteristics, they share much of the physiology of your race in the female phase of kemmer –”

_"Yes, I saw your pictures of them. The women looked like pregnant Gethenians, but with larger breasts. Do they differ much from your sex in mind behavior? Are they like a different species?"_

_"No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners—almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women… women tend to eat less… It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing…"_

_"Equality is not the general rule, then? Are they mentally inferior?"_

_"I don't know. They don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn't that they're stupid. Physically they're less muscular, but a little more durable than men. Psychologically..."_

I trailed off, at a loss, staring at the Chabe stove and grasping for a satisfying answer to Estraven’s query. It struck me that I had never fully considered the question, not as such, in the abstract, and in any case it had been so long since I had seen a true woman that a cogent analysis seemed impossibly out of reach.

Even more confoundingly, and despite Estraven’s return to somer, I had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling of having a woman with me in the tent, waiting for some verdict.

When it became clear that I had no more to share, Estraven cleared her throat and spoke in a clear and careful manner.

“I imagine that communication between alien cultures is never without challenges. You say that the notion of shifgrethor is incomprehensibly foreign to you, and I have done my best to ease the burden of it in our interactions, though of course this is difficult. However, it is you who came here to study my people, and you who have had years in their presence to catalog and understand the various social customs of my world. This must give you some basis from which to judge what it means when I act toward you in one way or another. Further, you say you received training to prepare you for the task of making contact with an unknown culture, which I presume included some notion of how to rid yourself of the myriad prejudices and assumptions of your native culture.”

I nodded. Estraven’s eyes narrowed somewhat.

“I have no experience of your people, and cannot presume to guess at what norms, alien to me, guide your interactions on your own planet. It seems to me, however, that your behaviour towards me has been greatly changed since we met in kemmer. I have wondered these past days what could have triggered this difference, and now suspect I know the answer.”

I stared at my companion over the Chabe stove and felt a hot, bewildering shame ooze into my stomach.

“Genry Ai, I will not tell you if your patronizing disregard for the females of your race is justified or unjustified, but I will remind you: I am not a member of your race. Do not forget this again. Am I understood?”

I nodded again, numb.

“Good. Now, I have some advice for you.”

Like that, we were all business, and no mention of shifgrethor to be waived.

_"You know that I sent word to the king concerning you, the day I left Mishnory. I told him what Shusgis told me, that you were going to be sent to Pulefen Farm. At the time I wasn't clear as to my intent, but merely followed my impulse. I have thought the impulse through, since. Something like this may happen: The king will see a chance to play shifgrethor. Tibe will advise against it, but Argaven should be growing a little tired of Tibe by now, and may ignore his counsel. He will inquire. Where is the Envoy, the guest of Karhide? —Mishnory will lie. He died of horm-fever this autumn, most lamentable. —Then how does it happen that we are informed by our own Embassy that he's in Pulefen Farm? —He's not there, look for yourselves. —No, no, of course not, we accept the word of the Commensals of Orgoreyn… But a few weeks after these exchanges, the Envoy appears in North Karhide, having escaped from Pulefen Farm. Consternation in Mishnory, indignation in Erhenrang. Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying. You will be a treasure, a long-lost hearth-brother, to King Argaven, Genry. For a while. You must send for your Star Ship at once, at the first chance you get. Bring your people to Karhide and accomplish your mission, at once, before Argaven has had time to see the possible enemy in you, before Tibe or some other councillor frightens him once more, playing on his madness. If he makes the bargain with you, he will keep it. To break it would be to break his own shifgrethor. The Harge kings keep their promises. But you must act fast, and bring the Ship down soon."_

_"I will, if I receive the slightest sign of welcome."_

_"No: forgive my advising you, but you must not wait for welcome. You will be welcomed, I think. So will the Ship. Karhide has been sorely humbled this past half-year. You will give Argaven the chance to turn the tables. I think he will take the chance."_

_"Very well. But you, meanwhile—"_

_"I am Estraven the Traitor. I have nothing whatever to do with you."_

With that, he turned off the light on the Chabe stove and crawled, weary, into his sleeping bag. I could see that our conversation had taken a toll on him but dared not suggest that he eat anything. Outside, the blizzard raged, and though the stove still gave off its blessed warmth and my belly was the fullest it had been for some time, I felt sick and sad.

Bitter, selfish, lonely tears welled up unbidden in my eyes. I felt like a failure, an impostor. All my training and dedication, the hundreds of others over whom I had been chosen, all vying for the honor of being a First Mobile – if they could see me now! Caught in the demonstration of sexist prejudice by someone who has never met a woman. How arrogant, to have thought myself above such bigotry. How deeply ingrained those views must be, for even here on the ice of another world, with them I had alienated my one friend again, abused the trust and affection which I most cherished.

How I had wronged Estraven – had perpetually _rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man._ And after all this time, rather than see him as he truly was, I remained blind; or rather, colourblind. I could see in only two colours, and as he was neither of them, could not see him at all. Only now, perhaps too late, did I see.

I slept, miserable.

Estraven was asleep the next time I awoke, and the next time, and the next. I drifted in and out of sleep, not certain how many days had passed or what time it was when I woke, as the flickering gray light and howl of the wind never changed. I despaired of dying here, as alone as I had ever been on any world, and the fear kept me awake.

I sat, and watched Estraven sleep, and let my thoughts tumble uselessly over the same question: how to fix this? How to make a third and largest apology succeed when two had already failed?

When finally he awoke, with a feebler struggle than usual, the timing was lucky; I had just made two mugs of orsh, and set one steaming before him. He blinked heavily up at me and I prayed that he might accept this as an olive branch rather than another patronizing gesture.

“I have been thinking,” I said carefully when we had drained our mugs and sat facing one another over the stove. “It is the Ekumen’s custom to send the First Mobile alone, as you know. This is tradition, and empirically has proven successful, and there are many reasons given for it. Of late, though, _I begin to wonder if I've ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic…_ but I digress. What I wish to say is this: even if we make it across the Ice and I summon my ship and Karhide and Orgoryen both join the Ekumen within the month, I nevertheless fear that I have failed my duty, in the most important sense.”

Estraven’s face made the slightest twitch – of confusion? I continued:

“You have been unfailingly kind and just toward me, and have done more for my purpose than I could have dreamed to receive when I came here, and yet I have wronged you. I was unworthy of your offered friendship. I met it with suspicion, and stubbornness, and arrogance. As if this were not enough, I have wronged you now a second time, despite our friendship. It is not merely ignorance of your culture of which I am guilty, but possession of the worst flaws in my own, which never should have been known on Gethen. You saved my life, and in return I coerced you, first into kemmering and then into mindspeech, against your judgment or without your consent. Even then, you saw clearly and I did not. Your assessment of my behaviour was perfect: I mistakenly bore against you the antiquated prejudices that my gender of my race bears against the females of my race.” I laughed bitterly, without humour, for I knew how empty my next words must sound. “I am sorry, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. I do not know how I can make up for this. For what solace it may bring, I suspect that your people have more to teach the others in the Ekumen of Known Worlds about human beings and human decency than all eighty-three can possibly offer you in return.”

Estraven stared at me for a long time, dark heavy eyes betraying nothing of his inner world. Then, silently, he lifted his right hand, palm facing me. I hesitated a second, then shaking slightly, placed my left hand against his. Our fingers shifted until they lined up with one another, like the two hands of one man.

“We are not the same,” he said, “and yet we can pull together.”

Relief, warm and desperately needed, flooded from that point of contact through my whole tired body. I choked back a sob.

Estraven smiled his wry smile. “Oh, Genry. Teach me to speak into your skull the way you did in mine. I am curious to know whose voice you hear.”

“Of course.” From that point forward, the long space between dinner and sleep was filled with our profounder conversations, exchanges in which each of us was, at last, understood.

_Towards the middle of Nimmer, after much wind and bitter cold, we came into a quiet weather for many days..._


End file.
